For some people, virtual meetings can be a less stressful way to communicate than in-person meetings.Credit: Getty
Problems with language and communication are often one of the hallmarks of autism, and as an autistic person, face-to-face conversation has never been a strength of mine. Facial expressions confuse me, and different tones of voice alarm me. Body language is baffling; inference is difficult. I don’t get most jokes, and I make less eye contact than others.
As a child, I would swing from babbling to my parents about my special interests until I was breathless to spending entire days at school without uttering a single word to anybody. This remained much the same when I continued on to higher education; in the few face-to-face tutorials that I attended during my distance-learning undergraduate studies at the Open University, I was invariably overwhelmed, often mute and always eager to return home and hide behind the safety of my laptop screen. And for the first two years of my postgraduate degree, I would regularly forgo heading to campus over fears that I would encounter someone else in the department who wanted to talk. At conferences, while everyone else was chatting over coffee, the only hobnobbing I did was with the complementary oat biscuits in a hidden corner or quiet room.
Even during group meetings with my own supervisors, who knew me better than anyone else, I struggled. I embarrassingly found myself blurting out my ideas while others were mid-sentence. Yet when I was invited to speak, I often clammed up and couldn’t find the words to match the thoughts in my head.
Pivot to video
But on 26 March 2020, all that changed. It was three days into the first UK coronavirus lockdown, and my lead supervisor had e-mailed me after the sudden campus closure. Obviously, we couldn’t have our weekly supervisions in the office for a while, he wrote, but something that we can do is Zoom each other. Let me know what you think — maybe we could try it next week? But no rush, only when you’re ready for it.
This scared me: talking face-to-face was torturous enough, how could I ever manage a virtual conversation with software I had no experience of using? I tried to think of ways I could get out of this situation but, invariably, I found myself stuck; the pandemic and lockdown weren’t going away any time soon, and e-mails alone couldn’t fill the void left by suspended supervision meetings. I had to …….